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C.J. Cherryh's Fiction
Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Burton Raffel
The new separator was working. The rest of the equipment was scheduled for checkout. Ari made notes by hand, but mostly because she worked on a system and the Scriber got in her way: in some things only state of the art would do, but when it came to her notes, she still wrote them with a lightpen on the TranSlate, in a shorthand her [computerized] Base in the House system continually dumped into her archives because it knew her handwriting: old-fashioned program, but it equally well served as a privacy barrier. The Base then went on to translate, transcribe and archive under her passwords and handprint, because she had given it the password at the top of the input. Nothing today of a real security nature. Lab-work. Student-work. Any of the azi techs could be down here checking things, but she enjoyed this return to the old days. She had helped wear smooth the wooden seats in Lab One, hours and hours over the equipment, doing just this sort of thing, on equipment that made the rejected separator look like a technologist's dream. That part of it she had no desire to re-create. But quite plainly, she wanted to say/in her write-up of this project. She wanted her stamp on it and her hand on the fine details right from the conception upward. I was most careful, in the initiation of this project-- I prepared the tank-- There were very few nowadays who were trained in all the steps. Everyone specialized. She belonged to the colonial period, to the beginnings of the science. Nowadays there were colleges turning out educated apes, so-named scientists who punched buttons and read tapes without understanding how the biology worked. She fought that push-the-button tendency, put an especially high priority on producing methodology tapes even while Reseune kept its essential secrets. Some of those secrets would come out in her book. She had intended it that way. It would be a classic work of science--the entire evolution of Reseune's procedures, with the Rubin project [cloning Specials] hindmost in its proper perspective, as the test of theories developed over the decades of her research. IN PRINCIPIO was the title she had tentatively adopted. She was still searching for a better one. The machine came up with the answer on a known sequence. The comp blinked red on an area of discrepancy. Damn it to bloody hell. Was it contamination or was it a glitch-up in the machine? She made the note, mercilessly honest. And wondered whether to lose the time to replace the damn thing again and try with a completely different test sample, or whether to try to ferret out the cause and document it for the sake of the record. Doing the former, was a dirty solution. Being reduced to the latter and, God help her, failing to find solid evidence, which was a good bet in a mechanical glitch-up, made her look like a damn fool or forced her to have recourse to the techs more current with the equipment. Dump the machine and consign it to the techs, run the suspect sample in a clean machine, and install a third machine for the project, with a new sample-run. Every real-life project is bound to have its glitch-ups, or the researcher is lying ... The outer lab-door opened. There were distant voices. Florian and Catlin. And another one she knew. Damn. "Jordan?" she yelled, loud enough to carry. "What's your problem?" She heard the footsteps. She heard Florian's and Catlin's. She had confused the azi, and they trailed Jordan as far as the cold-lab door. "I need to talk to you." "Jordie, I've got a problem here. Can we do it in about an hour? My Office?" "Here is just fine. Now. In private." She drew a long breath. Let it go again. Grant, she thought. Or Merild and Corain. "All right. Damn, we're going to have Jane and her clutch traipsing through the lab out there in about thirty minutes. --Florian, go over to B and tell them their damn machine won't work." She turned and ejected the sample. "I want another one. We'll go through every damn machine they've got if that's what it takes. I want the thing cleaner than it's providing. God, what kind of tolerances are they accepting these days? And you bring it over yourself. I don't trust those aides. Catlin, get up there and tell Jane she can take her damn students somewhere else. I'm shutting down this lab until I get this thing running." She drew a second long breath and used the waldo to send the offending sample back through cryogenics, then ejected the sample-chamber to a safe-cell and sent it the same route. When she turned around the azi were gone and Jordan was still standing there.
